Carousel Horses: A Song History

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"Carousel Horses" appears in Ellen Pratt's Ensemble Arrangements For The Mountain Dulcimer, Volume 6, set in six parts: two dulcimer parts, a bass, chord back-up and a countermelody in DAD tuning, plus a baritone part in ADA.[1] The book's sample page for the piece prints Pratt's name beneath the title and carries a 2022 copyright notice in her name.[1] Pratt's own contents page for the volume credits several pieces to their composers or to tradition, among them a Minuet in G attributed to J.S. Bach and the traditional "Rosin the Beau", but names no composer for "Carousel Horses", which it lists in 6/8 time.[2] Pratt has played the dulcimer for more than two decades, began writing her own pieces for it around 2004, and took up ensemble writing after joining a dulcimer orchestra in northeastern Connecticut.[3] The sources consulted here say nothing about how or why the piece was written.[2]

Painted wooden toy horse on a wheeled platform, harnessed to a toy carriage with a small coachman figure

Toy Horse, painted wood, 1770–1800. A toy horse, not a carousel figure, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the tune.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art places the Philadelphia workshop of D.C. Müller & Bro. in the years 1903 to 1918, within what the museum calls the carousel trade's early-twentieth-century heyday, and credits the firm with hundreds of carved figures, goats and zebras as well as horses, pieced together from separate blocks of wood and painted.[4] Its own example, a standing horse made around 1917 for a carousel's outside row, is basswood with glass eyes and steel shoes, and the museum notes that figures for that outer ring received especially close detail.[4] The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History holds a painted wooden carousel horse by Gustav A. Dentzel, dated about 1904 to 1909.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Carousel Horses"

Sources

  1. Ellen Pratt: "Ensemble Arrangements For The Mountain Dulcimer, Volume 6".
  2. Ellen S. Pratt: "Ensemble Arrangements for Mountain Dulcimer, Volume 6".
  3. DulcimerDownloads: "Ellen Pratt".
  4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: "Outside Row Standing Horse (Carousel Figure)".
  5. Smithsonian Institution: "Carousel Horse".
  6. Image: Toy Horse, painted wood, 1770–1800. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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